Abstract
Employing Tobin Siebers’s notion of “trauma art” from
his “The Return to Ritual: Violence and Art in the Media Age”, this
paper aims at a parallel examination of the co-presence of beauty and
violence in selective works from renowned Pakistani artists like Imran
Qureishi and Rashid Rana, and a contemporary Pakistani novel, Bilal
Tanweer’s The Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013). Art and writing in
Pakistan took a new creative turn as an aftermath of a sequence of
events that included 9/11 and widespread terrorism. The contemporary
creative realm in Pakistan does not only aspire to discover new arenas
with respect to aesthetics, but also delves into issues, which shape and
are shaped by questions of culture, nationalism, and self. This paper
attempts to investigate violence and its aestheticization in contemporary
Pakistani art and fiction and to explore the extent to which it has
succeeded in capturing our contemporary cultural scenario.
Furthermore, it examines how artists and writers simultaneously
challenge this turmoil through creating a thematic binary of hope and
resilience. This paper challenges the notion of considering Pakistani art
and fiction only a cultural product of our politically electrified and
instable state and establishes that it is, simultaneously, a resultant of our
richly creative and persevering spirits. Consequently, this study aspires
to intrigue researchers interested in similar domains and calls attention
to contemporary Pakistani art and literature, encouraging
interdisciplinary research.
Sahar Hamid, Shahzeb Khan. (2018) Beauty out of Chaos: A Parallel Study of Pakistan’s Trauma Art and Literature, Journal of Research ( Humanities), Volume LIV , Issue LIV.
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